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Review : Collected works – Edward James on science fiction giants and their imitators

By Edward James

SCIENCE fiction often harks back to its venerable ancestors, in homage, in
criticism or in an outbreak of sequelitis. This year we have been reminded of
two of the great classics from 1959: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for
Leibowitz and James Blish’s A Case of Conscience.

A year after his death, and nearly forty years after Canticle,
Walter M. Miller Jr, has supplied us with Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse
Woman (Orbit, £16.99, ISBN 1857230132), not so much a sequel as a
novel placed inside the original history. The Holocaust brings a new Dark Age,
and, as in the first millennium AD (so the historical myth relates),
civilisation is preserved by the Church.

The original story told how monks founded a monastery dedicated to the memory
of St Leibowitz (an electrical engineer before the Holocaust); this new tale
follows the career of a wayward monk during the period of rebuilding in the
American south. We meet some wonderful characters on the way, and get involved
in some all-too-plausible papal politics, but Miller never really captures the
reader’s interest, proving, perhaps, that authors are best advised not to
revisit their early invented worlds.

Mary Doria Russell’s first novel, The Sparrow (Black Swan,
£6.99, ISBN 0552997773), is much more enthralling. It is an obvious homage
to James Blish: Blish’s Roman Ruiz-Sanchez has become Emilio Sandoz, both of
them Jesuits stunned by contact with an alien race which has not been touched by
Christianity. There are implausibilities in the plot, and in the 21st-century
world she envisions, and the story is by no means as original as its blurb
maintains but while you are reading the novel, you hardly notice. The pace, and
the sense of impending doom, are relentless, and the emotional impact of the
story is far more powerful, to a 1990s readership at least, than Blish’s
original.

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The novel tells two parallel stories, of Sandoz’s rehabilitation after his
return to Earth as the sole survivor of a disastrous mission, and of the mission
itself as it progresses towards its gradually revealed but nevertheless shocking
conclusion.

The Sparrow was published last year in the US, and won the James
Tiptree Award (oddly, since that award is given for the best science-fiction
contribution to “gender-bending”, and that is not an obvious characteristic of
the book). If there’s one science-fiction book published this year in Britain to
read, this is it.

But James L. Halperin’s The Truth Machine (Simon & Schuster,
£9.99, ISBN 0684821338) perhaps unconsciously harks back to the golden age
of science fiction, when a writer takes one technological innovation, and
follows through its impact on society: never mind the clunky prose, just admire
the precision of the extrapolation.

Halperin imagines that the ultimate lie detector has been perfected:
everything is changed, not just crime and politics, and a utopia of sorts
emerges. The novel follows this story through the career of its
inventor—that hero figure for our age, an obsessed but brilliant computer
nerd—and it does have good momentum—and some good moments. One of
them comes at the very end, when Halperin charmingly betrays his utopian
credentials by giving an address for readers to write to to support the
development of a truth machine.

Gregory Benford, a much more skilled and knowing writer, must surely be
remembering early science fiction stories of pocket universes created in
laboratories (try Theodowre Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God) when he wrote
Cosm (Avon, &dollar;23, ISBN 0380974355, which is due to be published
in Britain in February).

Benford’s Timescape (1980) is celebrated as one of the few science
fiction novels that tries to capture the working life of a scientist. He does it
again in Cosm, though his white male scientist at Cambridge has been
updated into a black female scientist at Irvine in California (where Benford
works), and the working environment is one dominated by funding problems and
public relations exercises.

The plot is rather more trite than that of Timescape, however, and
despite the wondrous Cosm itself and the intriguing scientific discussions, the
book is more like a techno-thriller than the genuine tale of wonder of which
Benford is capable.

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Edward James, director of studies for MA in Science Fiction:
Histories, Texts, Media, University of Reading